Any Star Wars fan knows that the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are approximately 3,720 to 1. The odds are probably significantly...
EyeWire, neuroscience’s most audacious experiment, just opened up a digital museum.
Constructed with the help of a quarter million gamers, EyeWire Museum is one-of-a-kind: the...
While the popular phrase “disrupt yourself before someone else disrupts you” is often meant for organizations, Whitney Johnson believes that people should be in...
As technology has progressed, humans have become ever more powerful. With this power comes great opportunity and great risk. Nowhere is this clearer than...
Advances in biotechnology over the past decade have brought rapid progress in the fields of medicine, food, ecology, and neuroscience, among others. With this progress...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How the Enlightenment Ends
Henry A. Kissinger | The Atlantic
“Paradoxically, as the world becomes more transparent, it will also become increasingly mysterious. What will...
Earlier this month, I participated in a discussion/debate at the Vatican on the topic of “The Morality of Immortality.”
The discussion was moderated by CNN...
He isolated DNA from Egyptian mummies. He discovered the Denisovans, an extinct ancient human species, by sequencing DNA from a tiny bone fragment. He...
Jonah Sachs is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and “unsafe thinker.”
Sachs is the founder and former CEO of Free Range studios, a pioneering creative firm that...
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were designed to be efficient, low-friction alternatives to traditional financial systems. But it seems their creators maybe didn’t think too hard...
TRANSPORTATION
Elon Musk Presents His Tunnel Vision to the People of LA
Jack Stewart and Aarian Marshall | Wired
“Now, Musk wants to build this new, 2.1-mile...
From a first-principles perspective, the task of feeding eight billion people boils down to converting energy from the sun into chemical energy in our...
Recently, roughly 200 eminent scientists assembled in Boston. Their agenda? Creating “superhero” human cells impervious to all viral attacks and possibly other killers—radiation, freezing,...
When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid...
Superconductors are among the most bizarre and exciting materials yet discovered. Counterintuitive quantum-mechanical effects mean that, below a critical temperature, they have zero electrical...
ROBOTICS
Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini Robot Dog Goes on Sale in 2019
Stephen Shankland | CNET
“The company has 10 SpotMini prototypes now and will work with manufacturing...
Understanding Earth’s species and ecosystems is a monumentally challenging scientific pursuit. But with the planet in the grip of its sixth mass extinction event,...
Optogenetics, neuroscience’s hottest mind-control tool, just got a major update.
Projecting 3D-light holograms—yes, holograms!—directly onto a mouse’s cortex, engineers at UC Berkeley instantaneously gained control...
By now, you’ve heard of CRISPR—the bacterial self-defense mechanism that can be used to modify the genome. From “biohackers” building the hype by injecting...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How Can We Be Sure AI Will Behave? Perhaps by Watching It Argue with Itself.
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Having AI programs argue...
We are on the verge of transforming one of society’s most fundamental building blocks: manufacturing.
As new technologies enable manufacturers to customize everything, these same agents...
